Why Do Giraffes Have Long Necks?

Anyone who has seen this majestic creature in the wild, nibbling away at the top of an acacia tree, has to marvel at the wonder of evolution. The giraffe’s long neck is a perfect adaptation to the animal’s natural habitat. Clearly the giraffe evolved this uncommon and helpful trait in order to reach those nourishing leaves. That’s how natural selection works.

If you’re a 6-year-old.

As appealing as this explanation is, it shows a complete misunderstanding of the concept of adaptation by natural selection, a key concept in the theory of evolution. What’s wrong with the 6-year-old’s idea is not its focus on the neck’s function. It’s the mistaken notion that an individual giraffe, by its own effort and action, can transform its essential nature in a beneficial way.

In fact, natural selection for long necks is not a goal-directed transformation, and it does not take place in a single giraffe’s lifetime. It is in reality a very gradual change in the frequency of long necks in the species—a change that takes place because some giraffes who have that trait survive and reproduce more successfully in their world. The crucial point is that the change takes place not in an individual giraffe, but in a large population of giraffes.

We know this, because we’re educated adults, but it’s a difficult concept for young children. That’s because kids, until tutored otherwise, operate according to intuitive causal theories of the world—theories that emphasize design and purpose and intention. Kids are natural explanation seekers, and their intuitive theories are actually helpful in much everyday reasoning. But these cognitive biases can lead them to misconstrue complex ideas like natural selection.

That’s in part why we don’t try to teach kids such biological concepts. We wait until they are older and more cognitively mature. But this may be a serious error, according to psychological scientist Deb Kelemen of Boston University. According to Kelemen and her colleagues, if kids’ intuitions about the biological world are allowed to go uncorrected, they may coalesce and become deeply entrenched—so that they are more difficult to alter when teenagers learn about evolution later on.

Standard practice today is to teach younger children about some of the building blocks of natural selection—the idea that food is essential to survival, for example, or the fact that traits vary within a species. Kelemen is saying that we should not pamper our kids intellectually. Even though the integrated concept of natural selection is complex and counterintuitive, she believes that it’s better to begin familiarizing kids with it early—while their commonsense (but scientifically flawed) theories are still fragmentary. She and her colleagues—at BU and the University of Toronto—have developed classroom materials to do this.

Meet the pilosas. Pilosas are fictional mammals, and in the storybook that Kelemen and colleagues have created for classroom use, these creatures are going through a sudden die-off due to extreme climate change. Insects—the pilosas’ normal food source—have been driven underground, into deep, narrow tunnels, and the narrative tells a story of rapid natural selection and survival. Each page of the story adds a new biological fact, and taken together they show how pilosas went from having widely varying trunks to predominately thin trunks. Along the way they learn how climate change can alter habitat and diet, how food can affect health and reproduction, how traits are passed on, and so forth.

This is pretty heady stuff for 5- to 8-year-olds—the age of the kids the scientists studied. They wanted to see if kids this young have the capacity to learn a basic (but accurate) explanation of adaptation. So they pretested the children’s understanding of the basics of natural selection, and then re-tested them again after they read about pilosas. They assessed both their understanding of basic biological facts—the link between food and health—and their ability to integrate these facts into a coherent explanation of adaptation. The central question was similar to the giraffe question above, only it was about the fictional pilosas: Why do pilosas have thin trunks?

The scientists made the exercise challenging for the kids. They gave them no feedback, and the questions were deliberately structured to elicit inaccurate, cognitively biased answers from the kids, such as: Pilosas evolved long trunks so they could reach the insects underground. They wanted to set the bar high, to see if the kids could put aside their intuitive (but wrong) ideas about design and intention.

And they did. As reported in an article to appear in the journal Psychological Science, the children showed substantial learning about the concept of adaptation within a species. This was true even for kids who were weak on basic biological facts to begin with. What’s more, the children—even the youngest ones—were able to generalize the concept to other animal populations. Even the youngest kids learned a lot about evolution, although the 7- and 8-year-olds were remarkably good at suppressing their commonsense, but mistaken, theories of the natural world.

These findings suggest that perhaps current educational practices need to be revisited. Most schools now teach evolution only when students are 13- to 18-years-old, but many high school students never grasp these ideas. Indeed, many college students, and even biology teachers, have a poor understanding of natural selection and related ideas. It may be that waiting merely solidifies the cognitive habits that hinder such learning. Since 6-year-olds are natural born theorists, why not take advantage of that?

Comments

Possibly incorrect… The more likely reason a giraffe has a long neck is not so it can reach high leaves; this is consequential and secondary to the primary evolutionary driving force. The giraffe evolved from an animal which was a dog sized horse type of animal.They were prey to carnivores and so ran away when being pursued. The animals with longer legs were more likely to outrun the predator and so survived and reproduced. This continued with legs becoming longer and longer. This positive adaptation continued until a consequence of this was is made it more difficult to reach down to drink water; and so begun the evolution through natural selection of a longer neck to allow the giraffe to drink while standing up. This is why it is so important to present theories as just that: a possible reason which is open to being disproved and not the absolute truth. The Earth was once flat you know 😉

I am afraid too many folks use a great imagination when it comes to the outdated, unscientific, bankrupt philosophy of evolution. For instance, why would the giraffe get “tired” of bending down to drink water, and as a consequence, “evolve” longer necks? Longer necks absolutely require many other changes at the same time. Study the blood circulation involved in that long neck, and it just might give you a more accurate idea about design and purpose in God’s created world.

Well, I’ve just written all about adapting! You could of told me about that it was a six-year-old’s explanation sooner. Oh well, the people of the world will just have to live with not knowing the real facts. Not re-writing it now!

So children have an innate belief in animals having been designed for a purpose. No surprise there. They have to be “educated” out of this (in other words, indoctrinated.)

And why use a fictional “pilosas?” Probably because all of evolution is fictional anyway, so why not start with fiction! How can we say this?

Now we understand the complexity of the giraffe neck that is needed for it to survive–all the features to get the blood to the head without causing it to self destruct from incredibly high blood pressure when it puts it down to drink water. We also understand how it can ingest the thorns from the trees it eats from without it destroying its throat and digestive system (thick mucus that coats the thorn.)

We also understand that there need to be multiple simultaneous changes in the genome and the epigenome to allow these functional changes. A slow, gradual, neo-Darwinian process of one small mutation after another cannot account for these features. It is inconceivable–far beyond the probability boundary–that all of this could take place using the neo-darwinian processes.

So yes, to believe in evolution requires that we be indoctrinated out of our commonsense and more.

Whilst one may not think, thru contemporary aphasia, it is in fact very well known that, the animal that you refer to as a ‘Giraf’, is actually a pandæmonium of biologic evolution, and in some way revolution, over time. Thus their elongated traits, amidst their upper torso, is due to a, for a lack of better words, ‘stretch’, that happened hitherto. As horatio said, ‘evolution is gained, not dissipated’, an idea developed also by Lacan and Bernaisse Freud. I suggest you read up on them.

Kind Regards,
League of University of Switzerland,
8031, Zürich
Vanguard Dean Haste

With support from the James McKeen Cattell Fund, four researchers are devoting sabbaticals to advancing research on active sensing, spatial and episodic memory, and children’s emotional development… More